spotifast

Spotifast

Previously Fastpotify. Same native Spotify client, now at spotifast.rocks. The new name starts with version 0.8.0; your existing settings and sign-ins carry over, except when switching the Flatpak installation.

Spotify, native and fast. Spotifast is a Spotify client written in Rust with egui. It plays music through librespot. It typically uses 100–250 MB of RAM, while Spotify's desktop app often uses 600 MB to over 1 GB. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, starts in well under a second, and has no browser engine.

Playback needs Spotify Premium. Free accounts can browse and search, but cannot play music through Spotifast on this computer or another device.

See spotifast.rocks for installation, setup, everyday use, and connection details.

spotifast is the main command and fastpotify remains available for existing scripts. Settings and credential stores keep their established paths. AUR and Homebrew packages now use the Spotifast name. See rename compatibility.

What it does

• Plays music on this computer. Spotifast appears as a Spotify Connect device. Select it from your phone or play music in the app. Playback is gapless and supports up to 320 kbps, with optional volume normalisation and an on-disk audio cache. Stalled Spotify connections time out after five seconds per attempt so playback can try another endpoint. Since 0.8.0, a confirmed local seek discards audio queued from the old position. Decoder, download, and device-buffer delays can still apply. Starting a sorted playlist or Liked Songs view shows the requested song immediately while playback connects, using its loaded metadata (available since 0.8.0). Sorted views start at their first playable row. Filtering a playlist or Liked Songs keeps playback within the shown songs and preserves repeated songs; Play is unavailable when no shown song can play.

• Controls other devices. Move playback to a speaker, a phone, or another computer from the device picker, and keep controlling it: play, pause, skip, seek, shuffle, repeat, volume. Long device lists scroll.

• Finds speakers on your network. Spotifast finds librespot, spotifyd, and supported hardware receivers over mDNS. Once connected, they appear as Spotify Connect devices. The picker uses responding receivers' names and combines entries with the same device ID.

• Library. Browse playlists, Liked Songs, saved albums, followed artists, podcasts, and saved episodes. Filter, pin, and reorder sidebar items. Since 0.8.0, double-click a playlist in Library to start playback; a single click opens it. Settings offers a compact track list with one line per song and spaced separators between its name, artists and added date. Since 0.8.0, choose name, recent plays, or saved-date order where available. Follow Spotify’s playlist order or keep a separate local arrangement. Move Liked Songs among your pins or unpin it and choose its local position; the placement survives restarts. With local playback enabled, releases that the Web API groups as singles are labelled EP when librespot confirms that type. Liked Songs reopens from an account-specific metadata cache. Older rows refresh in the background while Like and Unlike take effect immediately. Right-click album, artist, and podcast cards for their actions (available since 0.8.0).

• Search across songs, artists, albums, playlists, podcasts, and episodes, with a top result and per-type views. Right-click results and cards for their actions. Text fields offer Cut, Copy, Paste and Select all from their right-click menu. Since 0.8.0, a personal app searches the catalogue while shared access finds playlists. Each part appears independently, even if the other fails.

  Since 0.8.0, the search field stays clear of the device and update badges in narrow windows; hover their icons to read the labels.

• Home with Made for you, Recently played, your top artists and songs, and recommendations. Right-click playlist shortcuts and shelf cards for their actions.

• Artist pages with popular songs, a filterable discography, and related artists. Album, playlist, and podcast pages support playback from any row. Since 0.8.0, album and playlist scrollbars represent the full track count; dragging to an unloaded section fetches that section directly. Discography and related-artist cards also have right-click menus (available since 0.8.0). Artist names in the player bar open their pages, including during local playback before Web API metadata arrives (available since 0.8.0).

• Edit your playlists. Create, rename, describe, reorder, and delete them. Since 0.8.0, hold a dragged song near the playlist's top or bottom edge to scroll to rows beyond the screen. The Library sidebar scrolls while dragging toward offscreen playlists too. On main, after 0.8.0, upload a JPEG or PNG cover from Edit details → Change cover. Add songs from a row menu, or drag a row or the currently playing song to a playlist in the sidebar. Since 0.8.0, dragging a selected row copies the whole selection in displayed order; the preview shows its count. Drop the selection on Liked Songs to save every selected song. Selection uses a translucent neutral highlight, without a row outline. Drop a song from the player bar, queue, or another list between rows of an open editable playlist to insert it there. This adds a copy and leaves playback and the queue unchanged. Clear the playlist’s filter and sort to choose an insertion position. Drop it on an empty playlist to add its first song. A playlist a friend shared with you takes songs too, as Spotify's own apps allow. Filter the Add to playlist menu by name to find the destination quickly.

• Opens Spotify links. Spotifast registers for spotify: links, so a song, album, artist, playlist, or podcast shared from another app opens in it, whether it is running or not. open.spotify.com addresses go through the browser, which hands them to the same handler.

• Queue as a side panel or a page; it names what is playing from, and anything can be added to it from a row menu. Add to queue places songs after those already queued and before the context continues. Selecting repeated playlist rows queues every occurrence in the selected order. A repeated click counts once, and the notification counts actual additions. Since 0.8.0, Recent keeps repeated short-song plays separate, including consecutive local repeats of the same song. Each Recent row starts the song it names and shows it in the player bar immediately while playback starts.

• Since 0.8.0, a playlist's Play button explicitly starts at its first available song when Shuffle is off and the original order is selected. Double-click a row to start there; use the player bar to resume. Cached playlists must match Spotify's revision and song count before their rows can determine playback order. Pending playlist edits stay visible and are saved to that cache only after all writes succeed. Refresh waits for pending edits and their Spotify revision to be confirmed; a failed refresh keeps the current rows and offers a retry. Choose Refresh in a playlist's … menu to pick up changes made in another Spotify client. Large playlist checkpoints read and write their JSON through a small background buffer, preserving the existing cache format without another full JSON copy.

• Lyrics. Follow synced lyrics in a side panel or full-screen view, or read unsynced lyrics when timestamps are unavailable.

• Resumes the last session. On startup, the last song is paused where it stopped. Play resumes it, and the other playback controls work before it starts.

• Album-art colour. Pages and the player bar take a tint from the cover of what you are looking at or listening to. Turn it off in Settings.

• Light and dark, or follow the system.

• Winamp mini player. Ctrl+M opens a small player for classic .wsz skins, drawn at 1x to 4x scale. It includes a spectrum analyser, playlist, and equalizer. It keeps its shade mode and, where the desktop permits, its own position when switching views. Drop a skin from the Winamp Skin Museum on either window to add it. On Windows, since 0.8.0, a mini player saved on a disconnected monitor starts at a default position on the current desktop. Clicking or double-clicking the Windows tray icon brings the window forward; the tray menu still offers Show or hide. On Windows, since 0.8.0, hide its taskbar button from Settings or the mini player's options menu while keeping the window and tray controls available. On Wayland, use the desktop's Keep Above shortcut or rule; the app's Always on top controls are unavailable there.

• Equalizer. Winamp's ten bands and presets over the music played on this computer, in Settings and in the skin.

• MilkDrop. The visualiser, powered by projectM, runs in its own window and process. It supports fullscreen and automatically downloads more than 10,000 .milk presets on first use (about 26 MB).

  https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/12b31312-0e0c-4b34-9383-e8c66aabc58d

• Keyboard-first. Every common action has a shortcut (Ctrl+/ or ? lists them).

• Keeps playing when you close the window. Spotifast stays in the system tray. Use the tray icon or media controls to reopen it, and quit from the tray menu or with Ctrl+Q. You can make the close button quit in Settings. On macOS, the Dock icon also reopens the window.

• Visible network activity. Pages show a spinner while loading. The top bar also shows slow or rate-limited Spotify requests.

• One instance. Launching it again brings the existing window forward instead of starting a second copy, on every platform.

• Desktop integration. MPRIS on Linux, so media keys, the shell, and playerctl see Spotifast like any other player. On macOS and Windows, fastpotify next and its siblings drive the running app from a terminal, a launcher, or a hotkey. On Windows, since 0.8.0, hover the taskbar button for Previous, Play/Pause, and Next under the window preview.

Install

On Arch Linux, Spotifast is in the AUR:

yay -S spotifast-bin      # the released build, ready made
yay -S spotifast          # the release, built from source
yay -S spotifast-git      # built from the latest commit

Existing AUR installations can switch with the matching command above. Accept the offer to replace the old package; saved settings and sign-ins are kept.

On macOS, with Homebrew:

brew install --cask crmne/tap/spotifast

Or download the Mac app, open the downloaded file, and drag Spotifast to Applications. Starting with 0.8.0, the Mac download passes Apple's security checks. Open it from Applications and confirm the normal downloaded-app prompt. No Terminal commands or changes to security settings are needed.

On Gentoo, niko-overlays offers an optional community-maintained package. Its current 0.7.1 ebuild builds post-release snapshot 67b8dfb, rather than the v0.7.1 release, and omits MilkDrop. Use the released binary or build instructions below if you want the standard release and feature set.

To enable the overlay with eselect-repository, run as root:

emerge --ask app-eselect/eselect-repository
eselect repository add niko-overlays git https://github.com/NikoMalik/niko-overlays.git
emaint sync -r niko-overlays